


Heat-stroke

by Schemilix



Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 01:39:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schemilix/pseuds/Schemilix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I live, I am Germonique, baptised in blood and ash. Traitor my name born on the gallows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heat-stroke

Some moments print themselves like coins on the malleable gold of a young mind. Later others may come and try to strike a different face into that surface - but it cannot be done. All that remains are confused ridges, malformed mountains of doubt and frustration. 

 Germonique feels he has been moulded a hundred times by now. He has been hammered flat, to start anew. All he looks for is a seal, wandering empty-handed into an abyss of time and freedom. 

 The first was an unclean blow, unskilled. Half the seal on the coin, the other half in emptiness. The rest in him blank, cut off by the edge of the design like teeth. That was what he felt like. Half-formed, unloved, destined for smelting. Assimilation. He would press the cross against his mouth, feeling it cut his lips. He would do it because it felt more like control than what the Church would normally have him do.

 Sinner, they had called him, false-seed. Get of two priests, sin made flesh, a punishment for them. Rather than cleanse themselves, they cleansed him.

 Dark spaces like cupboard or wombs; he cannot abide them now. Vulnerable like an idiot fawn they make him feel, dizzy and boneless. Germonique needs open skies, clouds, spice-smells, rain or grit or blood, anything but that.

 He was ‘Sicar’ then. More a dog’s tag than a name.

 Next a hail of circumstances, which he emerged from with more blades than made sense. A bandoleer of them at his hip, two swords he rarely took with him. Trained in the ways of the travelers from the East in somes ways, as a mage in others. Adept at neither, not yet. 

 Even later, a mage not aware that he would become legendary for it - even then his Magicks were exceptional only because of their origin. Of the standard Grimoires he knew little. Time Magicks, mostly. With them his blades struck one after the other before his opponent could so much as twitch.

 He considered many things, even the sky, but he was bad with machinery and worse at dealing with Moogles. A short-haired Viera told him where home was - nowhere. 

 Not yet, he thought. Not until these foundations are in ashes, and I am free. 

 He was known as Rozzarian, because of his skin. In truth, only his Mother was. 

 And then - ash. They burned them with his books. Mother, Father. Just words. Like bitch or whelp, they meant blood and blood alone. All he remember of her now is the smell of smoke, the stubborn way she tried not to scream until the very end. 

 He cut his hair, he walked, he kept walking. 

 And then the Saint. He should have killed him earlier than he did. Saved the world and himself the pain of a pretty corpse and a martyr. 

 Even when he was in front of the bars between that man and the gallows, he called him ‘Aji’. 

 In the storm that followed he wrote a book, a book that would last longer than his ‘eternal soul’. Eaten by a mad God, jealous of unworldly secrets. Blind now, his feet walk, but the mind does not. 

 Now he is timeless like Zomal. 

 Now, now he is Germonique, Blessed Apostate. 


End file.
